


The Moon Alone

by annavalentina



Category: Hellboy (Movies 2004-2008)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:48:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29946084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annavalentina/pseuds/annavalentina
Summary: [ARCHIVE]In her lived the winter.
Relationships: Nuada & Nuala (Hellboy)
Kudos: 2





	The Moon Alone

**Author's Note:**

> I take some liberties with the culture here, and play a bit with possibilities. The story is too short for anything major. It's also very much an experimental piece, feeling out her headspace.

When he left her - when, after everything, he left them behind - she almost hated him.

With a blind and anguished intensity. Not for her people and not for her father, the princess's response, the serene sacrificial queen. But for herself, for the hole he left in her soul that all the beautiful wilderness of her world could not encompass or satisfy. And she was immortal; not for her the fire of mortal life, which pulses in fervent abandon and burns itself out in quick cycles.

She would not be allowed the luxury of quick mourning, and she did not allow herself to think that even if she had been human, his absence would not have faded so quickly.

But he had left her to wage war, and she was trapped, the fading spring with her fan of pale blossom-laden branches, the white lady with no roots to hold her still in sleep.

Before he had gone he had found her in her bower, dressed in his black armor and still smelling of the battlefield; of fire and ash and earth, but strangely scorched clean of blood. The honor of the pact showed in him, the hard edge of desperation and desolation.

He could not forgive the humans all the deaths their greed had wrought. She had known he would not be able to from the moment their father spoke the words of peace, aged and weighty with regret and resolve.

"Sister," he said to her when he had risen, "I leave our father's court."

Her hands shook, and she hid them in her skirts. False words - words of farewell, of flighty luck, of blessing - failed her, and she could only look at him with the taste of betrayal like steel in her mouth.

"It is exile," he said to her, eyes ash-dark beneath his brow, face inscrutable. She could not read him, could not touch him, felt his distance like a spear through the heart.

"It is choice," she replied, and her hands knotted against each other. "If you would but speak to our father - "

Nuala could not have imagined fearing him in those days, would never fear harm he could deal her, but she flinched at the look in his eyes.

"I have had enough of the slaughter of our people," he rasped, eyes wintry cold. "The humans have no honor or truth. I will protect our people."

The silence she should maintain knotted in her throat, strangled her. A princess would be silent. Should not speak, should not protest.

But when he turned to go, the words tumbled out. "And I, brother? Do I matter so little?"

His head turned just enough to show the sharp glitter in his eyes. Knowledge kept them apart, poised like statues in a tableau, but the look in his eyes was like a touch. "Come with me, then."

Nuala stared at his back with dry eyes, felt her fingers bite into her skin. Thought of her father, and her people, and the death he was determined to deal.

"No," she whispered. It was the first time she had denied him anything he asked of her.

He left her there, and she did not weep for a long time, as hollow and cold as a bare-picked skeleton, as alone as the barren moon.

Time passed, and in her lived the winter.

When the summer ages came again, she went to the Troll Market, slipping down long halls, the weight of her mantle on her shoulders.

The prince is gone, little voices obligingly hissed to her when asked, he is underhill and cold on the borders of the iron lands. Not here, pretty princess, not here.

Nuala closed her eyes and went instead to a witch.

The dirtwitch, the Lady of ages in her cobweb veil and black-blind eyes, welcomed her with no words but a hand, black curling patterns like human hennae or poisoned veins over her long, long hands. Inside her burrow, roofed and walled by a latticework of thick roots, a deep silver bowl of water cradled in her crossed legs, she dipped her fingers to begin ripples and asked her what the princess would want of her.

"Tell me the future," she whispered, "tell me of my future. Tell me of my death." She finished, and the cold iron truth and want in her words rang clear. Tell me of my brother, and our end.

There was salt in the water for purity, and the dirtwitch touched it, pressed her fingers into it, and then yanked her hands up. The water followed and stayed, a glittering sinuous cascade, and she gave a guttural sigh in her throat, then laughed as sharp and bright as a knife.

"Child," she whispered, all the stars in her endless eyes flashing at once, "know this; you will die with him, not only at the same moment his heart falters, but with him. And it will be your death truer than his."

Prophecy a flighty beast, but a true engine. Prophecy the taste of steel. My death My choice. My brother.

Nuala left the dirtwitch’s burrow and passed monsters, children, black birds with jeweled eyes and beaks stained red with the blood of the murdered young. The scent of fire, incense, meat - the smell of animals, the smell of old papers, the smell of shadows.

She did not need the scent of him, from the way her heart jumped inside her body - beating frantically against her ribs, against the too-fragile cage of her body - she knew his presence, found him with her eyes in black, his hair unbound and eyes dark. He watched her from the other side of the market-road, a massive shape behind him, backed by the deep-folk, finding his allies and kin from the darker earth now.

She could not speak to him. There were no words for her.

She was, this time, the first to turn away.

Nuala's strongest memories were all of her brother, the second strongest of the war, the long death and the great fires and the bitter slaughter.

The first memory to be overlaid on those in strength was one of a human child.

She found him in the troll market, wrapped in a birdcage like a toy, and he gurgled and caught her dress as she passed him, plump fingers curling into the soft spider-spun fabric, cheeks curving into a smile as his eyes twinkled up at her.

Guileless. Nuala bent to him in her finery and stroked ash from his cheek, mud from his shoulder. "It's a rare beast indeed," the shop keeper advised eagerly, "or a delicacy, should yer desires lend t'that direction."

The child giggled and reached for her, unafraid, and she took his hand, fit her pale thumb to the pink center of his palm, let his fingers curl around hers.

Are we all so different? She wondered. It was her weakness, and wrought in terrible irony by, perhaps, Nuada himself. For too many years every living thing in the world but Nuada and she had been other, and unwelcome; he had encompassed her universe and all that she desired and cared for the most. The edges blurred now, left bereft and attempting to reframe connection in his absence.

She bought the baby, coins dropping with small sharp sounds into the seller's palm, and left him on the edge of a settlement. She was not so weary of her own kind and nature that she would take such a thing in. But neither was she as embittered by battle as her brother, to abandon all mercy.

Or perhaps it was simply her vengeance, small and helpless as it was. For every night that he was gone, she felt his absence in her heart, the cold knot of loss where he had been and gone.

And then he returned to her.

In the golden halls, long crumbled from majesty, she found him with his blade to the neck of one of their own people, standing on the brink of an unforgivable act. _Do not do this_ , she thought, and stepped forward. _Do not take this final step. Do not make this choice._

_Do not leave me._

But even when he turned to her, even when his eyes rested upon her with the familiar spark and knowledge, she knew he had gone beyond her ability to reach as she was. Gone, perhaps, beyond any mercy.

Are you lost to me? She thought wonderingly, and thought perhaps the timewitch had been wrong, for he stood still strong and living as she bled out from the inside, struck by the distance between them.

Perhaps this is my truer death, foretold and given to me like a brand. And she walked down the steps and beside him into her father's hall, and felt his brief touch on her arm like a caress, elusive and burning, and felt his eyes might mark her like iron, carving through her and laying bare the wound of her loss.

In all their long lives, it was the first time she was truly grateful for her father's effort to protect her heart from her twin.

_Then this is my death after all_ , she thought, and could, in the ultimate selfishness, say nothing but "yes" to his question. _Yes, I am content to fall now, and here, to protect all I love. Before you are irrevocably lost, and made even more my enemy. For you, brother, and with you._

_I would accept eternity's loss._

**Author's Note:**

> > _See the waves go down  
>  See the moon alone  
> See the world unshown  
> I raise my head and whisper_
>> 
>> _Rise and shine_  
>  Rise and shine my sister  
> The Cardigans ~ Rise and Shine


End file.
